Confluence PSG offers six core services. They are distinct in form but unified by the same underlying discipline: process design that produces outcomes rather than activity, and facilitation that moves rooms rather than manages them. Every engagement, regardless of service type, draws on the Collaborative Decision Making Process framework developed over more than fifty work groups and task forces.
Work groups and task forces managed across nine issue areas
Core services unified by a single process discipline
The hardest rooms are not hard because the people in them are unreasonable. They are hard because the process that brought them together was designed wrong. Participants were asked to take positions before they understood the problem. They were asked to vote before they trusted each other. They were asked to negotiate language before the reasoning behind each party’s position was visible to everyone else.
Confluence designs facilitation processes that address those sequencing failures before the first session begins. The work starts with individual conversations that surface what each participant cares about and what they need to engage without reservation. It continues through a structured sequence that builds shared understanding before introducing proposals, surfaces evidence before weighing options, and negotiates actual language rather than abstract ideology.
The result is not compromise for its own sake. It is durable agreement that each party can defend to its own constituency.
Documented outcomes: unanimous support for an AI governance framework from parties in direct opposition for two years · An 11–2 vote on a governance restructuring that had failed to reach a supermajority one week earlier · Consensus recommendations from a room that included prosecutors and defense attorneys · A disability rights framework built across four simultaneous subcommittees with 58 published recommendations
Multi-stakeholder working groups, legislatively created task forces, Governor-convened processes, negotiations among parties with competing interests and histories of direct opposition
Confluence designs strategic planning processes around that distinction. The work typically begins with structured input from staff, division leaders, and external stakeholders before any drafting begins. Leadership retreats are designed to surface real alignment and real disagreement rather than to ratify a predetermined direction. The resulting plan reflects what the organization actually decided, which is why it governs decisions rather than sitting on a shelf.
The measure of success is not the document. It is whether the organization is still using it twelve months later.
Most strategic plans fail not because they were written wrong but because the process that produced them did not create the ownership needed to implement them. A plan drafted by consultants and presented to leadership is not a plan the organization will use. A plan built through genuine engagement with the people responsible for executing it is.
Engagements have included three-year strategic plans for state agencies, board-level strategic planning for government enterprises, annual planning for membership organizations, and long- range planning processes for county governments.
State agencies and government enterprises, county governments, membership organizations, leadership transitions, boards navigating significant institutional change
Some conflicts are productive. Parties with legitimately different interests and perspectives working through real disagreement is how durable solutions get built. The conflict that Confluence is called in to navigate is a different kind: the kind where the process has broken down, where parties have stopped engaging honestly, where history and grievance have made forward movement feel impossible.
The distinction matters because the intervention is different. Productive conflict needs structure and a skilled facilitator. Broken conflict needs something more: a process that creates space for what has not been said, addresses the history that is driving the present dynamic, and builds the conditions for honest engagement before asking parties to reach agreement.
Confluence has navigated conflict between state agencies and the communities they serve, between organizational divisions with competing priorities, between parties with long histories of direct opposition, and between levels of government with overlapping and sometimes contradictory authority.
Processes that have already broken down, parties who have stopped engaging honestly, rooms with significant histories of direct opposition, intergovernmental conflicts with jurisdictional complexity
Conflict navigation at Confluence begins with the history driving the present dynamic, not with the presenting issue. The intervention addresses what has not been said before it asks for what needs to be decided.
Confluence Connects is a public engagement platform built and operated by Confluence PSG. It gathers surveys, written stories, audio and video comments from stakeholders who cannot be in the room, and organizes that input by topic for working group review.
It was deployed for the Colorado Educator Safety Task Force — gathering input from more than 1,100 educators — and is currently supporting the Colorado LTSS Coalition. It is available for facilitation, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and policy development engagements where the process calls for public or stakeholder input at scale.
The methodology that produces unanimous agreement among parties in direct opposition is the same methodology that produces a strategic plan an organization actually uses. The sequence, not the issue area, is what determines whether a room moves.
Individual pre-session conversations surface what each participant needs to engage authentically.
Shared definition of the problem before any proposals are introduced.
Information and data surfaced before any party stakes a position.
Full range of options explored before anyone commits to an outcome.
Actual text of agreements drafted together. This is why gridlocked rooms reach unanimous conclusions.
Organizations facing significant transitions, performance questions, or cultural challenges often need an honest external assessment before they can plan effectively for what comes next. The value of an outside perspective is not neutrality for its own sake. It is the ability to ask questions that internal relationships make difficult, hear answers that hierarchy suppresses, and present findings in a form that creates clarity rather than defensiveness.
Confluence designs assessments around the specific questions a leader needs answered. The inquiry may focus on structure, communication, culture, decision-making, staff morale, leadership effectiveness, or equity. The methods combine individual interviews, staff surveys, document review, and facilitated group discussions calibrated to surface honest input rather than managed responses. Findings are presented with specific, actionable recommendations grounded in what the organization’s own people said.
Assessments have supported agency transitions under new leadership, organizational realignment following significant growth or change, and governance reviews for membership bodies navigating internal conflict.
Leadership transitions, post-crisis organizational review, governance questions for membership organizations, agencies facing significant structural change
Individual interviews · Staff surveys ·
Document review · Facilitated group
discussions · Findings presented with
actionable, grounded recommendations
Policy development at its best is not a technical exercise. It is a process of building sufficient shared understanding and agreement among the parties who will have to live with the policy that what gets adopted is both substantively sound and politically durable. Confluence has been involved at every stage of that process: the early stakeholder conversations that define what problem is actually being solved, the evidence- gathering that informs what solutions are viable, the multi-stakeholder deliberations that produce recommendations, and the legislative and regulatory processes that turn recommendations into law.
The firm’s policy development work spans AI governance, transit, education, workforce development, criminal justice, civil rights, wildfire resilience, housing, fiscal policy, and healthcare. In each domain, the goal is the same: policy that works in practice, not just on paper, because the people responsible for implementing it were part of building it.
AI governance · Transit · Education · Workforce development · Criminal justice ·
Civil rights · Wildfire resilience · Housing · Fiscal policy · Healthcare
Confluence facilitates across all of these simultaneously. Housing connects to transit connects to workforce connects to AI. That cross-domain perspective is one of the firm’s most concrete advantages in any single room.
From statewide listening tours to targeted small-group engagement, the method follows the need.
Stakeholder engagement done well is not a box to check. It is a source of information that the people making decisions do not have and cannot get any other way. The difference between authentic engagement and performative engagement is in the design: who is invited, how the question is framed, what conditions are created for honest input, and what happens to what is heard.
Confluence designs engagement processes scaled to the question and the stakeholder population. A statewide listening tour that shaped the prioritization of $3.8 billion in federal funds required seven geographic regions and ten additional audience-specific sessions. A Medicaid sustainability initiative required a sequenced architecture that moved a large and diverse stakeholder audience from shared context through policy education to focused small-group input. A survey of more than 1,100 educators required trust-building design that allowed people to say things they had never felt safe saying to anyone with institutional authority.
Every engagement program is designed specifically for its context. The method, scale, format, and sequence follow from what the client actually needs to know and who actually needs to be heard.
Statewide policy input at scale, agency listening tours, ARPA and federal fund prioritization, public input on contentious issues, engagement with communities historically excluded from decision- making
Confluence has served as process architect and neutral facilitator for Governor- convened working groups, legislatively created task forces, and state agency strategic planning at the highest levels of state government. State leaders bring Confluence in when the problem is too complex, too contentious, or too consequential to hand to a standard contractor.
City and county leaders face the same dynamics as state government in compressed form: competing constituencies, limited resources, and decisions that have to hold across a politically diverse community. Confluence has helped local leaders build regional consensus on housing, navigate transportation funding, and design strategic plans that staff will actually implement.
Government and private sector leaders often need each other and distrust each other in equal measure. Confluence has the credibility on both sides to convene those rooms and the process discipline to produce agreements that each party can defend to its own constituency.
Some problems do not stop at city or county lines. Confluence has designed and facilitated collaborative processes among municipalities, counties, regional bodies, and state agencies on issues where no single jurisdiction has the authority or the resources to act alone.
Community organizations and advocacy groups are often the most important voices in a collaborative process and the most likely to feel the process was designed without them in mind. Confluence designs processes where these voices shape outcomes rather than merely inform them.
A task force that produces recommendations and then dissolves has done half the job. Confluence helps clients design coalitions and bodies with the structure, membership, and operating norms to sustain the work after the initial process closes.
State agency leaders, Governor’s offices, county governments, and organizations navigating problems that have resisted every standard approach reach out directly. The engagement starts with a conversation.
CO · NC · FL · National
